Every modern engineering team moves fast. New features ship weekly, security scanners run daily, dashboards glow green — and everyone assumes the software is safe enough.
But beneath this rhythm, something invisible is growing.
Every unresolved vulnerability, every “we’ll fix it later” decision, every outdated dependency quietly adds to a hidden liability in your codebase: security debt.
Unlike a bug that breaks a build, this debt doesn’t stop delivery. It just waits — accumulating risk, compounding complexity, and silently expanding your exposure.
If technical debt slows you down, security debt drains your resilience — and your resources.
Security debt is the sum of known but unresolved vulnerabilities living in your running software — across your own code, your dependencies, and your infrastructure-as-code.
Each vulnerability is a potential entry point for an attacker. Once it reaches production, it becomes a liability — a weakness you now “owe” to the future.
It’s not theoretical risk; it’s a measurable backlog of vulnerabilities that already exist in production.
The problem is not that you have security debt — everyone does — but that you might not even know how much.
According to Veracode’s State of Software Security 2024 report:
What differentiates one company from another isn’t whether they have security debt, but whether they can see it, measure it, and manage it.
Security debt behaves just like financial or technical debt — but with higher stakes.
When teams postpone fixes, skip reviews, or delay patching vulnerable components, they’re taking an invisible loan.
It buys short-term velocity, but adds long-term cost.
The interest accumulates as:
Each “later” adds friction, cost, and risk.
And unlike technical debt, which mainly slows you down, security debt can cost you business — through incidents, compliance gaps, or lost trust.
We’ll explore those hidden costs in detail in our next article.
Every software company generates security debt — often faster than they realize.
Security debt isn’t a sign of negligence — it’s the natural byproduct of building software at scale.
But unmanaged, it grows beyond control.
Security debt is invisible not because it’s small, but because it’s fragmented.
It lives across multiple, disconnected sources:
Each tool has its own format, scoring, and severity model. The result?
A scattered picture where no one truly knows the total amount of debt or its real business impact.
But the bigger issue isn’t fragmentation — it’s misprioritization.
Most scanners prioritize issues based on generic severity scores (like CVSS), not on how those issues actually affect your context.
So teams often fix “critical” vulnerabilities that may be irrelevant, while ignoring “medium” ones that expose sensitive data paths.
That’s how organizations end up creating more debt while trying to reduce it: by fixing the wrong issues first.
We discussed this in detail in our previous article: Generic triage doesn’t work. Contextual triage does.
Without contextual prioritization — based on code ownership, exploitability, and business criticality — you’re fighting the wrong battles.
Security debt doesn’t just sit still — it compounds.
Like interest on a loan, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to pay down.
Imagine this timeline:
What was once a one-line fix now requires a full refactor, new tests, and coordination between teams.
That’s the hidden side of aging code:
When developers leave or technologies shift, nobody remembers why a vulnerable component was implemented that way. The remediation becomes riskier, slower, and more expensive.
In security terms, inaction carries an interest rate — and it’s often higher than you think.
For years, security debt was an abstract notion. Today, it’s a strategic concern.
Three forces make it impossible to ignore:
The faster you move, the faster your security debt grows.
And while financial debt is visible on a balance sheet, security debt remains invisible — until it costs you.
Every company carries security debt.
Most can’t say how much, where, or how fast it’s growing.
Recognizing it is the first step.
Quantifying and managing it is what protects your business.
Security debt isn’t just about exposure — it’s about cost:
Understanding and reducing that cost starts with visibility.
Because what you can’t see, you can’t fix — and what you can’t fix, you’ll eventually pay for.
At Glev, we help engineering teams make their security debt visible, measurable, and we help them crush it.
Want to understand your own debt — and how to reduce it before it grows? Contact Glev's team right now 👇